UTB

The history of UTB

UTB built more than a million tractors, exported them to a hundred and fifteen countries, and ended as a property transaction.

The works started as something else entirely. In 1925 the predecessor firm I.A.R. — Intreprinderea Aeronautică Română — was founded at Brașov as a Romanian-French joint venture to build aircraft, adding aero engines five years later and becoming an autonomous state enterprise making armaments from 1938 to 1945. Nineteen different aircraft types were built there before the war ended.

It was turned over to tractors in 1946, under Soviet influence, and the IAR 22 — the first Romanian tractor — was built that same year. I.A.R. became the state metallurgical enterprise in 1947 and then, in 1948, under communist nationalisation and wholly state-owned, Uzina Tractorul Brașov: UTB. From 1950 to the end of 1960 the works traded as UTOS, Uzina Tractorul Orașul Stalin, because the city itself had been renamed Orașul Stalin.

Development of the U 650, at 65 hp, began in 1960 and it went into series production in 1963. Between 1963 and 1968 the works built 45 hp engines under Fiat licence and pushed the S 1300 crawler from 130 to 150 hp. From 1968 to 1976 two model families ran in parallel: the U 445 to a Fiat design and the U 650 to its own. In 1970 UTB built 28,500 tractors across a programme of 23 models, and passed 30,000 the following year. Between 1977 and 1990 the range stretched from a 26 hp Fiat-based model up to 70, 80 and 100 hp machines. About 23,000 people worked for UTB in 1990, and the plant was laid out for as many as 45,000 tractors a year.

Privatisation began in 1990, after the revolution, and UTB became a joint-stock company — around 80% held by the state asset agency A.V.A.S. and about 17% by the investment company SIF Transilvania. The years that followed brought heavy rationalisation, job losses and protests. The export map shrank with it: 30 to 40 countries up to 1992, 25 to 30 until 1998, and only 15 by 2004–05, of which Iran, Egypt, the United States, Turkey and Pakistan were the most important. Export earnings between 1990 and 2001 came to around $520m, on roughly 90,000 tractors. In December 1999 UTB was split into nine independent companies, one each for tractors, engines, the foundry and forge, machine tools, fixtures, cabs, repairs and parts, technical development and electrical repairs.

Around 760,000 UTB tractors had been exported by 2005–06: 320,000 to Asia, 245,000 to Europe, 95,000 to North America, 72,000 to Africa, 22,000 to South America and 6,000 to Australia.

The end came quickly. UTB lost €46m in 2006 alone and had accumulated debts of some €250m, about €200m of it owed to the Romanian state. Around 2,300 people were still at the plant that year, a tenth of the number sixteen years earlier, and production was already running only in part. On 23 February 2007 production stopped, the Brașov factory closed, and the company filed for voluntary liquidation the same day; the last 1,900-odd employees were dismissed. At a liquidation auction on 5 July 2007 a Romanian property investor, Flavus Invest, bought the entire 126-hectare site — tractor production, foundry and forge — for €77m, trademark rights included, and has planned one of the largest new building complexes in eastern Europe there since. Flavus stated plainly that it was interested only in property development, and the purchase contract carries no legal obligation to continue actually building tractors: the clause that appears to require it concerns only keeping the stated business purpose registered. The European Commission opened an inquiry in September 2007 into whether the sale involved unlawful state aid, and decided on 2 April 2008 that it did not and that the price could be considered market-conforming, low though it was against the sums discussed between 2003 and 2006.

Something did carry on, under other names. At the end of 2008 Flavus sold a partial licence for the old U 650 — 65 hp, no cab — for the Egyptian market, and production of the copy started that year at the Roman works, also in Brașov, using engines and cylinder heads from India and gearboxes from a firm at Sfântu Gheorghe. Around 1,000 former UTB workers were to be taken on in 2009, against a first order of 600 machines; it was priced at about €9,700 and was not approved for Europe on emissions. Flavus also negotiated the full UTB brand and licence package with the Chinese firm HOYO-SHK, which intended to invest several million dollars in a new plant in the Brașov district. When Hoyo did start production at Râşnov in June 2010, it was with a new model range and under its own brand name.

Written from Traktorenlexikon: UTB, Wikibooks, CC BY-SA 4.0 · retrieved 2026-09-14. Our words, not the source's.